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Lemme get my main thesis out in the open first thing:

The search for intelligent life in space is a quasi-religious endeavor.

The unstated hidden hope is that we will find up in the sky people who are better and wiser than us, and who will prove they’re better by sharing that wisdom, ushering in, if not exactly a golden age, then one of shiny brass.

The unstated assumption is that they will be like the Vulcans in Star Trek, more advanced than we are, but impressed by our courage and our curiosity and our just plain ol’ fashioned humanness so that even though they are technologically and culturally far superior to us, they’ll toss the keys of the galactic federation in our lap, letting us run things for everybody’s betterment.

Snowflake,
please…

(I mean let’s acknowledge this is a white and / or Anglo / European colonial fantasy from the gitgo, okay?  No sane species will let us anywhere near the torpedo room, capice?)

The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is a harmless enough exercise, and I’ll be honest, it would be cool if they actually found something, but at its core it’s no different from going into a place of worship and attempting to contact the divine.

(Mind you, I have absolutely no objection to that in principle, either, but I know how a lot of supposed spiritual searchers are actually searching for cudgels to batter their fellow humans into submission; and besides, as will be pointed out below, the search for the divine shares some similar issues with SETI, so read on, MacDuff…)

My next major thesis is this:

Nobody knows what they’re looking for, SETI or conventional religion.

They dress it up in fancy costumes but when you strip both groups’ sky beings naked, you find they’re looking for people just like us in every important way (i.e., we understand them, they understand us, and they don’t hold us accountable for our bullshit).

Here’s a few issues I have with the current state of SETI affairs:

1. We don’t know what alien life would look like.

2. We don’t know how alien life would think.

3. We don’t know what alien life can sense that we can’t sense.

4. We don’t know how alien life would process information.

5. We don’t know how alien life would adapt to its environment.

(There’s more -- much, much more -- but these will do for the moment.

Point 1:
I’m not talking about green skinned Martians with six limbs, I mean we don’t even know if alien life would have a cell structure or pass along generational information via DNA.

Personally, I think there’s a remote possibility life on Earth did not evolve but is a product of panspermia, in which case any life we encounter on other planets in this solar system may indeed use cell structure, DNA, etc.

But that’s just “a chance greater than zero” not hard evidence.

We literally have no idea what other life would look like so we have no way of knowing where or what to look for.

Someone familiar only with North American forest insects might have a hard time identifying life found at the bottom of the Marianas Trench -- and that’s part of the planet we all share.

There’s a fringe science called shadow biology that wonders if there may be life on this planet that we can’t identify because it looks and behaves so differently from us.

That’s another one of those “greater than zero” speculations -- but the fact we can define right now what would constitute alien life means all we’re doing is looking for Vulcans.

Point 2:
We don’t even know how we think; howda %#@& can we anticipate how alien intelligence would think.

I got into this discussion decades ago at a sci-fi con and the fan I was talking with blithely assumed we would recognize one another as intelligent based on whether we used mathematics and my question then and now is:  ”How would you know?!?!?”

Math is a symbolic language that (apparently) interprets basic underlying principles in a way that humans can grasp and apply.

The principles exist whether or not they are expressed, or how they are expressed.

We humans “see” 2 + 2 = 4 as “logical” because out symbolic language links the concept of two distinct objects added to another two distinct objects as being the equivalent of four distinct objects, but we have no way of knowing if an alien intelligence grasps the concept of distinct objects.

For them it may all be just part of a continuum.

There could be aliens desperately trying to contact us right now, using methods we can observe, and we just can’t grasp that there’s even a message to be grasped! 

Point 3:
Holy cow (no, not a religious exclamation), this point is huge and we just keep glossing over it.

Humans possess better color vision than canines.

We see three primary colors, they see only two (blue and yellow).

There are other terrestrial species -- butterflies and mantis shrimp, to name two – who see colors far beyond human range, well into what Dr. Seuss would call the “on beyond zebra” range.

Even if we could talk to dogs, we couldn’t tell them what green looks like:  There is literally no place in their brain to process that color.

Or consider binocular vision, i.e., depth perception.

Most humans have depth perception but many -- for any number of reasons -- do not.

A lot of animals lack binocular vision (indeed, on Earth encountering a creature with binocular vision is fraught with danger because they’re almost always predators of some sort, using depth perception to attack prey).

Try explaining depth perception to someone who’s only had vision in one eye since birth.

“Well, it doesn’t have a color or a texture or anything like that, you really can’t ‘see’ it except…well…you actually can see it insofar as you can ‘see’ the actual space that exists between two objects instead of just guessing based on visual clues…”

Again, we may be bombarded with messages from space all the time that we simply lack the ability to sense.

Point 4:
This is a lot like Point 2 but different enough to enjoy its own category. 

I mean a couple of things when I refer to processing information.

First off, there’s the actual processing time.

Remember the sloth DMV scene in Zootopia?

Imagine we contact a life form that takes a standard terrestrial year just to express “2 + 2 = 4”.

The entirety of human history would pass before it could get to basic trigonometry.

How do you communicate with that?

(And what would you talk about?) 

Conversely, we would be like ferrets on espresso, the worst form of cultural ADHD imaginable to them

And the script could be flipped!

We could be the ones taking forever to respond, their elaborate and erudite answers might flash by in less than a nanosecond.

We also don’t know what an alien species would value.  We have Maslow's familiar hierarchy of needs but there’s no guarantee these would motivate any other species.

Thigs that would be extremely vital to us might be wholly unimportant to aliens and vice versa.

The fact our sky is blue is just an interesting fact to us, to aliens it might be the single most important thing they’ve ever encountered.

We simply have no way of knowing!

Point 5:
Europeans encountering North American native peoples dismissed them as “primitive savages” because they didn’t smelt ore, they didn’t use wheels, and most of their cultures lacked a written language.

Ignore the fact they had well traveled trade routes stretching from the Bering Sea to the Gulf of Mexico, ignore the fact many of them governed and protected well organized territories the size of France or Germany, ignore the fact they lived in an environment not only abundant with easily available natural resources but also possessed the time to work those resources at a leisurely pace.

The European interlopers sure ignored those facts.

SETI looks for machine based physical communication from alien life (physical here including any form of energy used to convey information such as a telegraph or a laser beam).

Presuming alien life exists it may never have occurred to them to attempt to communicate in the manner humans do!

It would be like putting a mime on the radio.

The great unuttered chauvinism of the Drake equation and Fermi paradox is this:
That there exists a basic template to intelligent life that’s so common the law of averages says we must find examples of it just like us wherever we look.

That’s an awfully big assumption, folks.

And we’re nowhere close to proving any of it.

© Buzz Dixon